Thread by @iyad_elbaghdadi

Stream of consciousness thread. Excuse the typos coz I'm not reviewing and not editing, just tweeting as it comes

I think what's happening in the United States is that the country is correcting its identity. The United States for many of its people was already and since its founding a white supremacist country. The United States is adopting a new identity and those left behind are rebelling

Just check what happened last year. Monuments being torn down = old heroes being abandoned. Sports clubs and military bases being renamed. What it means to be an America is being renegotiated by a new generation who are appealing to the promise of equality under one nation

So many Americans, mostly white but not only white, were raised under the idea and identity that this is a nation of white people for white people, with some non-whites being allowed a place under the sun if they accept and endorse white supremacy. They don't like this

This change or shift in identity is intergenerational, it started perhaps in the 1960s. After I started thinking that this is a shift in identity, I came across Baldwin saying about the same thing in 1965 in that famous debate. "If this country is to adopt a new identity..."

Identity is more fundamental than politics, tech policies, public spheres, etc. All of the conversations happening about the politics of the moment, the legality, big tech, online moderation etc are sub-plots of the larger story of a change in identity

What it even means to be an American, what it means to be a patriot, what America even is, all of this is being negotiated in what feels like another civil war (without the war). When pro-Trump folks say "we want our country back" they actually mean it, it was "their country"

All of this is why I think conversations on how to avoid or reverse radicalization, how to keep online spaces inclusive, what kind of policy agenda to pursue etc are on their own inadequate unless the big issue is acknowledged and adopted as a framework. This is a new America

For all the talk about going back onto the world scene, what America is more likely to do (and needs to do) is to turn inwards as it maneuvers itself past this very important moment of its existence. It's no longer a colony of white colonialists on stolen land. It's maturing

I mean history is history and you can't change the fact that America started as a white colony on stolen land, but I believe that psyche lingered on. That psyche is shifting towards one that actually conceives of itself as something new, while also acknowledging its history

Zooming out. 500 years ago a bunch of Atlantic (i.e. "Western") European nations trying to circumvent the Ottomans ended up discovering a half-planet that was open for them to exploit. The resulting half-millennium brought lots of progress but also lots of inequality

Every ideology and paradigm developed in the last 500 years was developed in the shadow of that enormous event in human history. The "old" world's cultures were mostly neck and neck, then suddenly the "West" shot so far ahead of everyone and created an unjust world order

We're on the comedown from those heady 500 years now. The world is balancing out again, returning to its natural state where its cultures are, as they should be, neck-and-neck. The theories of supremacism that sought to explain & justify the inequality are crashing as they must

End of thread and now I get to read it and get horrified at wtf I wrote

Ok, not as horrible as I thought. I'm not an American of course but find the MENA to be a weird parallel. In America, "most of us only came here a few centuries ago, how do we co-exist as equals?" In the MENA, "most of us have always been here, how do we co-exist as equals?"

I hope this change in identity portends a change in identity of humanity as a whole. We are all one race (the human race) and we share one home (earth). A random human being in Bolivia or China or Indonesia is a sister or brother and their life is not worth more or less than mine

It's a day later and this thread has received a lot of attention so I just want to add two points:
- These things play out over decades, not years
- There will be a violent backlash and it may last for a while, depending how it's handled

Remember to never compromise on any human being's dignity, especially your own but including your "enemies". This long fight isn't worth it if we end up leaving people behind. Nobody gets left behind, not even "them".